Chariot Choogle

 

Some have said that Marc Bolan’s lyrics are so much gibberish redeemed only by the sheer power of his guitarage. Not so! Bolan’s lyrics are deeply and profoundly metaphorical. Let’s have a look…

Girl you are groove
You’re like the planets when you move
See the winter ‘coming In a two finned caddy
Gonna walk upon the waters
Go ooo yea

Girl you gotta cook
You got the chariot by the hook
I’m riding in the rain
Got my blue suede shoes
Gonna give up all my pain
And go ooo yea

Baby you know who you are
Baby you know who you are
Don’t you know who you are

Standing on your porch
You wear your pleasure like a torch
Hiding in the road
Like a Pasolini toad
Gonna give up all my load
And go ooo yea

So the chariot represents the unbridled subconscious libido, the planets symbolize the cycles of life, the ‘winter coming in a two finned caddy’ is a double metaphor. Winter means doom, death and destruction and the caddy represents, um, the unstoppable force of destiny, yeah. Blue suede shoes are the equipment, literal and metaphycological required to withstand the arduous journeys of  life, obviously. The line about Pasolini is especially tricky. ‘Toad’ is the universal symbol for cold wet slimy things that eat bugs, but Pasolini, hhmm. When someone like SPM references Pasolini it’s obviously a confession of his own latent homosexual desire to be made roadkill by a disgruntled ‘rent boy’, but since the songs on The Slider predate Pasolini’s murder by three years the underlying metaphor must lie elsewhere. The image of doom coming in the form of a luxury car, and the phrase ‘hiding in the road’, lead to the inevitable conclusion that the song is a prescient forewarning of the upcoming automobile related endings of Pasolini and Marc Bolan himself. The embedded message is that one should overcome one’s fears and live life to the fullest, before you wind up dead in a car or underneath one. And you thought it was just a stupid pop song!

Channel Z

I’ve always believed the B-52 girls had worn wigs all along, but here is proof indicating that that was their own hair. At a 1990 SNL rehearsal, they can be seen performing in hefty curlers and dressed in normal looking clothes. Have to say, Kate Pierson looks really pretty all dressed down like that. Nowadays I’m almost certain they are wearing wigs, or at least extensions. I saw them at ACL 2009, and of course they were amazing, easily winning over a crowd of barely legal Arctic Monkeys fans. They looked and sounded great, and Fred still does his funny dance moves. It was a short set, as per usual festival standards, only about an hour. They hit most of the big ones and even squeezed in a couple of new numbers, including Funplex. The ACL grounds looked and smelled like a feedlot, with odorous brown mud ankle high, but it didn’t dampen the fun of the event and was utterly worthwhile. Photos by me, BTW. I usually don’t take photos at concerts, nominally because picture taking interferes with total concentration, but really because it’s hard to shoot a moving target in the dark while drunk. Since it was not dark and I was not drunk that day I got a lot of shots that day.

Changes IV

What the IV stands for I’m not sure. Perhaps there’s a Changes I, II, & III around to be discovered.

Changes

 

Leave ‘em to their own devices long enough and they’ll surely wind up writing their own theme song. Perhaps not intentionally, but they’ll write something that besides being catchy and popular will come to be perceived as a summary of their self-philosophy. Think about anyone who’s made it out of the gate and everyone has a nifty  summarizing theme song. Changes, clearly, is the theme song for Bowie’s career. Surely not intended as such, though. He most likely didn’t plan to go on shedding skins like a snake for the rest of his life. The usual term is ‘chameleonlike’ but as Bowie himself pointed out “a chameleon changes colors to blend in with the environment. I always thought I did the opposite of that.” What lies beneath the constant stream of changes? A deep pathology of the soul, or a short attention span, the urge for self-creation, building, expressing or hiding of the true self? Who knows. Like somebody  once said – it’s only you-know-what, but we like it.

Model of the Week: Claudia Schiffer

What can be said about Claudia Schiffer? She’s a living legend at this point. She’s an iconic face. Why is she so enduringly popular? It must be the guileless combination of Bardotesque sex appeal and Bavarian milkmaid goodness. It must be the way her assets – definitive blonde hair, curves like no other – balance out her relative shortcomings - noticeable overbite, average looking legs – making her seem like a realistic total package; perfect but not too much.

with Helena Christensen and Nadja Auermann

with Naomi Campbell and Karen Mulder

with Helena Christensen and Cindy Crawford

with Karen Mulder, Nadja Auermann and Shalom Harlow

(with Cindy Crawford)

(with Nadja Auermann)

(with Nadja Auermann & Julia Stegner)

Book notes…

Last month I was without my good friend the internet for three weeks. It was a sad and painful time of separation. Not being able to look up anything in the world at the drop of a hat, no videos, no music except via iPod, no Lolcats,  and no blogging. On the other hand, I did get a lot of reading done. So much reading, in fact, that I’m having trouble remembering off the top of my head what-all I have read this year. It’s much too overwhelming to do a series of full book reports at this late date, so I’ll simply do quick rundown. This is six books, all I can remember at this moment. I’m pretty sure more will come to me…

• Tom Robbins has long been one of my favorites, even when I was at an age when most of his big ideas made no sense to me. His latest, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates is…vintage Robbins, to use a cliche. Exuberantly irreverent and deeply philosophical and dead-parrot absurd all at once.
• Gillian Flynn’s new novel Dark Places, although it does not achieve the same feverish level of grotesquerie as her debut  Sharp Objects, has its own cold  Midwestern Gothic appeal. It’s a mystery, a didhedoneit, and a macabre portrait of hopeless small town life, dead end people, wasted years, and other dark things.
• For those of us who reluctantly enjoyed the Twilight series, the power of the story rose above the clumsiness of the execution. I’m happy to report that The Host, Stephenie Meyer’s first book for grownups is unequivocally excellent. The concept is truly golden: Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the aliens’ perspective. And although Meyer’s prose will never be called poetic, she’s improved dramatically as a writer. The simplicity of her style works in her favor this, and she drives the story along with vivid intensity. Meyer’s strength is her grasp of emotions – especially female ones – and she’s finally written a heroine with a complex (but not distracting or annoying) flow of thoughts and feelings. And, of course, a totally awesome sci-fi concept.
• After I enjoyed Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque so much, I was very eager to find more of her work. Although Kirino has written over a dozen novels, only four of them have been translated to English. Real World is slighter than Grotesque, both in size and in depth. The story concerns a disturbed young killer and four teenage girls who, each for her own reasons, are drawn into his orbit. Each girl struggles with her own problems, and the suspense is in discovering which ones are survivors and which will flounder. Though none of the characters are as deeply damaged as the ones in Grotesque (barring the murderer), and none of them have such dark lives, it is still a compelling and oft unflattering window on contemporary Japan.
• Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 is a thriller about a serial child murderer and the one man who can track him down and end his reign of terror against all odds, etc. Yes, it’s a fast paced, violent tale about sick minds, honor and justice. What makes it worth reading for those who don’t like to read about child-killing maniacs is the milieu, meant to be exotic, but to me depressingly familiar. The story takes place in and around Moscow during the dark final days of Stalin’s regime, when the mustached one was engaged in a game of mass murder against his citizens that would’ve made Hitler squawk with envy. The hero, a disillusioned MGB officer, has to solve a series of murders while everyone around him insists that crime does not exist. From what I can tell Smith did his research and he captures the toxic paranoia of the period. It would have been dramatic enough reading without the fisticuffs and daring escapes (or disemboweled children for that matter) but there are thriller conventions to be fulfilled as well here. I thought Smith’s transitioning between povs is clumsy and the choice to print dialogue Russian style – that is, sans quotation marks – doesn’t really make any sense. Using Stalin’s death as dea ex machina in the final act is also a lazy move. But overall, I would recommend it – it’s the old serial killer chase mystery in a very different setting, one that presents a unique set of problems.
• Meanwhile, I’m still working to conquer Kurt Vonnegut’s formidable oeuvre. Galapagos is not one of his top five bestest. Maybe not even in the top ten. But this is Vonnegut, who couldn’t fail to be entertaining, witty and wise even had he wanted to. I only have three novels left unread, and when I’ve done that, I’ll decide once and for all which ones aren’t in the top ten. Today, I think I’ll start Bluebeard.

The Changeling

The Doors are unusual because nobody has ever had any success copying them. They were and still are very popular. Certainly, they’ve been an influence on thousands of people. But nobody sounds like The Doors. The other interesting facet of The Doors is that they didn’t sound like anybody before them, either. Sure, they had influences like anyone else.  But they rarely showed their roots. For most popular bands, even vastly influential and groundbreaking ones, it’s easy to glean from their songs exactly who their musical forebears were. The usual track to creating an original sound is by failing to adequately reenact someone else’s. Not so the Doors. Anomalous as that is, they were not without their own plagiarism, but Jim’s interests being of a more literary nature, the average listener could be counted on to miss whichever Dionysian dead French guy was being referenced. For the highly edumacated, the game of ‘name the source of that riff’ becomes ‘name the book Jim just read and regurgitated’.  Me, I’m not highly edumacated, and I’m sure there’s lots that goes right over my head. Anyhow, here we find a song based on a recognizable musical source, which does happen. It’s not the only Doors song that shows off a classic blues beat, don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting complete originality sprung from a drunken void. But I could name some groups for whom each and every song is an attempt to resurrect Elvis (or whomever), so I do admire The Doors for not being too beholden to their elders.

The Change

This is fun… Our Nina believes in reincarnation, among other interesting things. She is Christian, Jewish and Hare Krishna. I also think she might be a believer in the theory that HIV is a product of big pharma designed to sicken and enslave the populace – she wrote a song about it, anyhow. She looks about the same way she sounds and thinks and lives her life that way too. That is, very colorfully and eccentrically, and very happy about it all.

Chance Meeting

Yes, that’s Jack Nicholson in the little video clip you’re about to see.  A very young, pre-fame, pre-every-award-known-to-mankind-winning, pre-good-movie-making Jack Nicholson. I forget the name of the movie, but I’ve seen it and it’s one of several craptastic low budget horror flicks he made in the 50′s. What that has to do with Roxy Music…oh, nothing at all. Somebody thought it would be a good fit, and they weren’t entirely off base. It’s a series of romantic, sad sort of images from a cheezy movie, met with a romantic sad sort of love song from somebody who enjoys the imagery of old cheezy movies. Death and longing and love, anyone?

Champagne

Marc Almond really likes cabaret. He likes torch songs and romances. And Vegas showgirls and sleaze. On top of all that he’s interested in exploring the feelings on the fringes of society; the heartbreak of lonely gay cruisers, etc. All those interests must be combined somehow, and this is the result.